The Tao of Boyd: How to Master the OODA Loop
By Brett and Kate McKay
Article Link: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/ooda-loop/
- Starts with some background to explain who Boyd was and some of his notable contributions
- Aerial Attack Study
- EM Theory
- Work on F-15, F-16, A-10
- Fails to mention his briefings such as patterns
- Fails to mention his work in the reform movement
- Fails to mention his work with the Marines and maneuver warfare
- These could be due to OODA playing a big part in it
- Introduces the OODA Loop
- Briefly talks about how it is typically misunderstood
- Simplified
- All about speed
- Why it is misunderstood
- No real written works, just briefings and
- “Destruction and Creation.”
- Talks about what the OODA loop really is
- “its power is in the way it makes explicit, that which is usually implicit”
- “It is a learning system, a method for dealing with uncertainty, and a strategy for winning head-to-head contests and competitions”
- “Ambiguity is central to Boyd’s vision… not something to be feared but something that is a given…We never have complete and perfect information. The best way to succeed is to revel in ambiguity.” –Grant Hammond, The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security
- Discusses ambiguity and inability to cope/adapt
- “When our circumstances change, we often fail to shift our perspective and instead continue to try to see the world as we feel it should be”
- Discusses mental models
- What are mental models
- How can they fail?
- “Boyd points to three philosophical and scientific principles to show that trying to understand a randomly changing universe with pre-existing mental models only results in confusion, ambiguity, and more uncertainty”
- “Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. Boyd inferred from Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems that any logical model of reality is incomplete (and possibly inconsistent) and must be continuously refined/adapted in the face of new observations. However, as our observations about the world become more and more precise and subtle, a second principle kicks in which limits our ability to observe reality correctly: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.”
- “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. In a nutshell, this principle shows that we cannot simultaneously fix or determine the velocity and position of a particle or body. We can measure coordinates or movements of those particles, but not both. As we get a more and more precise measure of one value (velocity or positions), our measurement of the other value becomes more and more uncertain. The uncertainty of one variable is created simply by the act of observation. Applying this principle to understanding the world around us, Boyd inferred that even as we get more precise observations about a particular domain, we’re likely to experience more uncertainty about another. Hence, there is a limitation in our ability to observe reality with precision.”
- “2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Applying the Second Law of Thermodynamics to understanding reality, Boyd infers that individuals or organizations that don’t communicate with the outside world by getting new information about the environment or by creating new mental models act like a “closed system.” And just as a closed system in nature will have increasing entropy, or disorder, so too will a person or organization experience mental entropy or disorder if they’re cut off from the outside world and new information. The more we rely on outdated mental models even while the world around us is changing, the more our mental “entropy” goes up.”
- Discuss examples illustrating these
- Synthesizing these 3 principles
- “Taken together, these three notions support the idea that any inward-oriented and continued effort to improve the match concept with observed reality will only increase the degree of mismatch.” [emphasis mine]
- “to the man with only a hammer, everything is a nail.”
- “It is a state of mind, a learning of the oneness of things, an appreciation for fundamental insights known in Eastern philosophy and religion as simply the Way [or Tao]. For Boyd, the Way is not an end but a process, a journey…The connections, the insights that flow from examining the world in different ways, from different perspectives, from routinely examining the opposite proposition, were what were important. The key is mental agility.” –Grant Hammond
- OODA Loop
- Simple diagram
- Doesn’t tell the whole picture
- Complete diagram
- Explain each part
- Simple diagram
- Observe
- “If we don’t communicate with the outside world–to gain information for knowledge and understanding–we die out to become a non-discerning and uninteresting part of that world.” –John Boyd
- “By observing and taking into account new information about our changing environment, our minds become an open system rather than a closed one, and we are able to gain the knowledge and understanding that’s crucial in forming new mental models”
- Examples
- Two problems in this phase
- “We often observe imperfect or incomplete information (thanks to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle)”
- “We can be inundated with so much information that separating the signal from the noise becomes difficult”
- As John Boyd scholar Frans P.B. Osinga notes in Science, Strategy, and War, “even if one has perfect information it is of no value if it is not coupled to a penetrating understanding of its meaning, if one does not see the patterns. Judgment is key. Without judgment, data means nothing. It is not necessarily the one with more information who will come out victorious, it is the one with better judgment, the one who is better at discerning patterns.”
- Orient
- “The reason Orient is the schwerpunkt of the OODA Loop is because that’s where our mental models exist, and it is our mental models that shape how everything in the OODA Loop works. “
- As Osinga notes, “orientation shapes the way we interact with the environment…it shapes the way we observe, the way we decide, the way we act. In this sense, orientation shapes the character of present OODA loops, while the present loop shapes the character of future orientation.”
- “Destructive deduction” and “Creative induction”
- “Imagine that you are on a ski slope with other skiers…that you are in Florida riding in an outboard motorboat, maybe even towing water-skiers. Imagine that you are riding a bicycle on a nice spring day. Imagine that you are a parent taking your son to a department store and that you notice he is fascinated by the toy tractors or tanks with rubber caterpillar treads.
Now imagine that you pull the skis off but you are still on the ski slope. Imagine also that you remove the outboard motor from the motorboat, and you are no longer in Florida. And from the bicycle you remove the handle-bar and discard the rest of the bike. Finally, you take off the rubber treads from the toy tractor or tanks. This leaves only the following separate pieces: skis, outboard motor, handlebars and rubber treads.”
- “A loser is someone (individual or group) who cannot build snowmobiles when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change; whereas a winner is someone (individual or group) who can build snowmobiles, and employ them in an appropriate fashion, when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change.”
- “it’s a continual process; as soon as you create that new mental concept, it will quickly become outdated as the environment around you changes.”
- How?
- Multiple mental models to pull from
- “The Air Force has got a doctrine, the Army’s got a doctrine, Navy’s got a doctrine, everybody’s got a doctrine. [But if you] read my work, ‘doctrine’ doesn’t appear in there even once. You can’t find it. You know why I don’t have it in there? Because it’s doctrine on day one, and every day after it becomes dogma. That’s why….”
- “Well, I understand you’re going to have to write [military] doctrine, and that’s all right… [But] even after you write it, assume it’s not right. And look at a whole lot of other doctrines – German doctrine, other kinds of doctrines – and learn those too. And then you’ve got a bunch of doctrines, and the reason you want to learn them all [is so that] you’re not captured by any one, and you can lift stuff out of here, stuff out of there…. You can put your snowmobile [together], and you do better than anyone else. If you got one doctrine, you’re a dinosaur. Period.”
- “In his presentation of Strategic Game of ? and ?, Boyd lays out seven disciplines every military strategist (or any person strategizing how to win any kind of conflict or competition) ought to know:”
- Mathematical Logic
- Physics
- Thermodynamics
- Biology
- Psychology
- Anthropology
- Conflict (Game Theory)
- Destroy and create mental models
- Always be orienting
- Test or validate mental models before operation
- Multiple mental models to pull from
- Decide
- “component in which actors decide among action alternatives generated in the Orientation phase.”
- “For Boyd, it’s impossible to select a perfectly matching mental model because:
- We often have imperfect information of our environment
- Even if we had perfect information, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle prevents us from attaining a perfect match-up between our environment and our mental model“
- “When we decide, we’re essentially moving forward with our best hypothesis — our best “educated guess” — about which mental model will work”
- Act
- “Boyd has “Test” next to “Act,” again indicating that the OODA Loop is not only a decision process, but a learning system”
- As Osinga notes in Science, Strategy, and War, actions “feed back into the systems as validity checks on the correctness and adequacy of the existing orientation patterns.”
- “We gotta get an image or picture in our head, which we call orientation. Then we have to make a decision as to what we’re going to do, and then implement the decision….Then we look at the [resulting] action, plus our observation, and we drag in new data, new orientation, new decision, new action, ad infinitum…” –John Boyd
- Tempo
- “Under OODA loop theory every combatant observes the situation, orients himself…decides what to do and then does it. If his opponent can do this faster, however, his own actions become outdated and disconnected to the true situation, and his opponent’s advantage increases geometrically.” -John Boyd
- Talks about why tempo is important and relevant
- Does not use the word friction
- Alludes to the fact it is relative to the opponent
- “First, the individual or organization that can go through successful, consecutive OODA Loops faster than their opponent will win the conflict. Second, rapid OODA Looping on your part “resets” your opponent’s OODA Loop by causing confusion – it sends them back to square one“
- Talks about how people misinterpret speed/tempo
- “What often gets overlooked by folks studying the OODA Loop is that when Boyd talked about rapid tempo, he often meant rapid changes in tempo”
- “our actions need to be surprising, ambiguous, and varying; speeding up and slowing down your actions quickly and irregularly can create confusion just as much and sometimes more than simply blowing through your OODA Loop”
- Discusses how this time scales based on level (tactical, operational, strategic)
